Cain’s protagonist, Vitoria, is a woman out of time, striving to know herself and her talents. Except for her desire to write, she is strangely passive: artistic experiences—paintings in a museum, ballet, concerts—seem to wash over her (or flow through her, as she describes it) without making much of an impact. She gets momentary pleasure from these experiences, but the pleasure is small and quiet. Even sex with her husband makes her feel “almost close” to him. In a way, the novel is not about the transformative power of art, but art as sustenance, as a groping form of self-definition. “I wanted to tell her about my writing,” she thinks of her new friend Dana, “but I was afraid she would think I was exaggerating my relationship to it, that I was lying. After all, I wasn’t a *real* writer, yet I wrote every day. Though I hadn’t cleaned for a while, to say that I was a maid would probably have been a more accurate way to say who I was” (51).